There are battles between different browsers for a long time now and it all began when netscape and microsoft started the war;) First is now almost forgotten and the second one survived and is today fighting mostly with Mozilla, Firefox and Opera.
Each of those has many fans which will say that his browser is the best! But WHICH IS REALLY THE BEST???

On the page HowToCreate they tried to answer that question as they were comparing the most popular browsers for Linux (Firefox, Mozilla, Konqeror, Opera, Epiphany), Mac OS X (Safari, Opera, OmniWeb, IE, iCab, Firefox, Camino) and Windows (Avant, Escape, Clue, Firefox, IE, Mozilla, Opera, Netscape). They were comparing "coldstart", "warmstart" and the speed of CSS rendering, pictures, scripts and history...

Results are here: Not a single browser is as good as OPERA which is THE FASTEST BROWSER at the moment and is the most apropriate for every platform.

http://www.howtocreate.co.uk/browserSpeed.html

Well, I suppose Internet users don't just look out for surfing speeds. We look out for other qualities like user-friendliness, ability to work across platforms, support for web standards, features, open-source support, etc etc. Speed alone is not a very good comparison.

Opera is the fastest browser it may be true, I have also feel this on my home computer. But the difference is not very much when we compare it with Firefox. Firefox has a lot of other features which we can't find in Opera. And the most important point is that some websites are not viewable correctly in the opera including Yahoo.com

I am currently running firefox on my pc wher its true it has got the speed but also I find I have many problems with tables and some pages end up split and some flash sites just go completely crazy. Although I find it more effective than any other browser I have used with the exception of the glitches in which I just resort back to IE.

Opera free version slow the internet down with ads. Better go for the registered version if you want to use Opera. For me I use Firefox, It's availible for every platform and It's OpenSource

iam using registered opera and trust me its better than mozila or IE . Mozilla has lots on enhancements i know but I just need basic browser with lots of ease of use! Opera is great for tabbed browsing And gives real nice speed for browsing. but opening lots of tabs will dig up your ram .

I dont agree with "jcguy" Cause speed is everything for me.. As i need to download many things daily so anything will do for speed even an ugly looking with lesser features than IE and offering 5 to 10 kbps+ download Speed Is great for me..!

Firefox in its default configuration is pretty slow, although it is very flexible. I think that the speed of firefox could be greatly increased if they applied a couple of the speed hacks to it.

The most important thing I want with a browser is not the speed but it's standards compliance. Opera as far as I know, does poorly in that situation although some parts it does better than IE.

I've been listening in on IE7 development, and still hear the same story, "security, security, security", if it wasn't so business driven, we'd be seeing "standards, standards, standards". I really don't care what browser it is, as long as they meet the standards, that's the one I would go for, IE still doesn't fully support CSS1 and it's quite sad to have to point out these things to them just so they can say "it's not a priority, but will be placed on their to do list".

I don't blame the developers though, they understand the importance of meeting the standards.

As far as I know Safari has the best support for standards, yet I don't own a Mac so I can't say if that's true or not. Out of the other browsers IE has strong points, Firefox has strong points and Opera has strong points, but none of them shine through as being the best towards standards, although IE was a bit slack.

<rant>As for the IE developers, why wait for the recommendations to be passed before implementing it? Is it to cut your workload down? Is it so your browsers are always behind? What is it? This is what I don't understand. You know the recommendation will only alter marginally, I doubt they will drop it, so why not work on keeping up too? I just want to be able to make use of the latest in web standards to get the idea whether it's worth renovating the sites again and without having the major browser support this means I have to wait for you.</rant>


MC

Gee, Solanky, what you say seems pretty biased towards Firefox. Keep that bias off

But anyway, I dont really care what web browser I use except for the following categories::

User-friendliness
Download manager
Loading speed

That is why I migrated from Internet Explorer to Mozilla Firefox about a year ago (or more, I can't remember when). I was surprised to see another web browser!! Well, honestly, I didn't know what web browsers were. I thought Internet Explorer was some cool program... and that was that. Hahaha!!

I have the feeling that Internet Explorer 7 Beta is faster than all tho other browsers. But as mentioned before, speed is not everything that matters.